Global programmatic ad spend reached $642 billion in 2025 and is expected to grow to nearly $800 billion by 2028. In the U.S., digital ad spending long ago surpassed traditional channels, with the vast majority of that spend going into mobile specifically.
While programmatic is still growing, the “how” is changing. The industry is moving away from an ecosystem optimized primarily for scale toward one optimized for quality, control, and adaptability. These five trends are shaping that shift:
1. Curation moves from “nice to have” to a default buying layer.
Curation is increasingly the mechanism buyers use to reduce waste, consolidate supply paths, and create more intentional media portfolios. Instead of buying inventory as a broad pool, curated marketplaces pair audience data with specific, transparent supply relationships. The value proposition is straightforward: fewer redundant paths, fewer unknowns, and more control over where budgets flow.
As more advertisers pressure the supply chain to prove its value, curated supply packages are becoming a practical answer to long-standing programmatic inefficiencies.
2. AI expands from optimization to segmentation and supply packaging.
AI’s role in programmatic continues to broaden, moving beyond bid optimization into audience construction, content-based segmentation, and smarter supply packaging. AI-driven approaches are increasingly used to interpret signals at scale and translate them into actionable segments and curated buying opportunities, particularly in mobile and omnichannel environments.
In other words: AI is not only helping decide what to bid. It is also shaping what “inventory quality” and “audience relevance” mean in the first place.
3. Measurement remains complicated, and expectations are recalibrating,
Despite robust programmatic tooling, holistic campaign measurement is still constrained by real-world realities: inconsistent identity signals, fragmented platforms, walled gardens, multi-touch journeys, and the growing share of impressions that do not produce a neat click-path to a conversion.
In 2026, sophisticated buyers are increasingly separating what they want to measure from what is realistically measurable, and then designing testing frameworks that match those constraints. The winners will be advertisers who treat measurement as an operating discipline, not a dashboard.
4. AI search reshapes format investments, creating new inventory gravity.
As AI search and conversational interfaces reduce click-through behavior on the open web, advertisers will rebalance investments toward environments where attention is still deep and measurable, including mobile, video, and in-app experiences. At the same time, new opportunities will emerge inside AI assistants and AI-powered search experiences, likely mixing sponsorship, commerce actions, and recommendation-style placements.
This trend matters for programmatic because it changes where demand pressure accumulates. If fewer sessions begin and end on publisher pages, more competition will concentrate in channels that still offer high-intent and high-attention moments, and the industry will need new norms for what “good inventory” looks like in answer-first experiences.
5. Agentic buying changes execution, but it does not erase strategy.
Agentic workflows are starting to influence how programmatic campaigns are planned, optimized, and governed. Protocols and tools built for agentic demand aim to make buying more automated, but the big shift is not “hands-off marketing.” It is faster iteration and more adaptive decisioning within guardrails.
In practice, agentic buying is likely to accelerate bid and budget adjustments, reduce time-to-test, and make optimization feel more continuous. But advertisers will still need clear goals, clear constraints, and clear definitions of “good outcomes,” especially as inventory quality and measurement remain uneven across channels. The IAB’s release of its agentic roadmap was an important step toward helping agentic buying to scale with the establishment of standards.
Want to learn more about the evolving role of programmatic advertising in the modern digital ecosystem? Download our comprehensive “2026 Programmatic Advertising Guide for Media Buyers” here.
To learn more about how Start.io can help supercharge your programmatic advertising, contact us today at marketing@start.io.
